Chief Charlo of the Salish VOLUME 15 NUMBER 5
Chief Koostatah of the Kootenai
THE MONTH OF THE CELEBRATION DANCES
JULY 11,1986
Proposed IHS regulations would hurt less-than-Vi-degree members
Are you an enrolled member with less than V4 degree Indian blood? If so, the federal government wants to save money by cutting you off from Indian Health Service benefits.
Proposed rules to limit eligibility for IHS services to quarter-degree (and more) Indians were published June 10 in the Federal Register. Should they become law, some 1,840 Tribal
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members on the Flathead would no longer be eligible for IHS medical care, in spite of their enrollment. An undetermined number of un-enrolled Tribal descendants would also become ineligible.
The new rules wouldn't save any money on the Flathead, however, because they could add to the service unit's burden a few thousand half-degree non-Confederated Salish and Kootenai Indians living just off the Reservation in Missoula and Kalispell.
The proposed rules " would require an eligible person to be: (a) a member of a federally recognized Indian tribe, AND (b) of 1/4 or more Indian or Alaska Native descent, AND (c) reside within a designated health service delivery area. A person who is not a member of, or eligible for membership in, a federally-recognized tribe would have to be 1/2 or more Indian or Alaska Native ancestry and reside within a designated health service delivery area" (NIHB Health Reporter, (Continues on page two)
Group seeks more changes at FIIP
A group of non-Indian Reservation residents is assertively campaigning to get the BIA and the Tribes farther away from the management of the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project.
The campaign, which concerns the power division of FIIP, follows an attempt made last year by some of those same non-members to divorce the BIA from the irrigation division. The 1985 campaign was successful only in getting another federal agency, the Bureau of Reclamation, involved
with the controversial project.
The group, the "FIP Electric Cooperative Task Force", would like to see FIIP's power division be managed by a rural electric cooperative (REC) run by an elected board of trustees.
Among the 13 or so reasons it gives for the formation of an REC, the group notes that, "Tribal management would undoubtedly exacerbate racial tensions". An REC, it says, would be politically neutral.
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News from the July quarterly meeting................Page 2
Salish Kootenai College graduation..................Page 6
The Story of Chief Cliff.............................Page 8
TTYP hosted by Tribes once more..................Page 14
Places to go, things to do..........................Page 16
Standing Arrow Pow Wow information............Back page